black & white now

Both my
birth and baptismal certificates read: Enrique Cecilio Fernández de Llano. I am
not the POTUS nor, born in Cuba, could I be, nor ever dreamt of such a thing –
a cowboy is another matter. But like the Man, I have a story of foreignness,
immigration and Otherness that accounts for such a mouthful.

A gravestone
in Roberts Cemetery, a short walk from where I now live in a rural corner of
the Florida Panhandle, bears the flamboyantly Spanish name Enrique Arturo
Fernandez, among the rather reserved Roberts and Smiths and Williams. But even
that is not my father’s full name, for he was Fernández Borges, following the
Hispanic custom of using both the paternal and maternal patronymics, which
turns the all-too-common Fernández into something grander.

It helps, if
one is a Fernández or Pérez or García, to have a mom with a more interesting
surname. Thus, the Spanish poet with the totally banal name García is known as
García Lorca, or more commonly, Lorca. Even with two boring patronymics the
trick works. There are almost as many Márquez as there are Garcías, but put
them together and, voilá, Nobel winner García Márquez. My dad’s maternal
patronymic is also the name of a writer, Borges, who never felt a need to add
another patronymic, though he is known by both first and middle names, Jorge
Luis. I’m sure the cacophony of Jorge Borges disturbed his finely tuned – he
was blind, after all – ear.

So here are
the whys of my name. Enrique is my dad’s name and my family is not very
inventive, or maybe they just wanted to perpetuate themselves – I gave two of
my sons the middle name Enrique, but would never dream of saddling them with
being yet one more Enrique Fernández, one of me is perhaps one too many.

Cecilio,
because I was born on the day of St. Cecilia. Love the saint, patron saint of
music. Hate the middle name, never use it.

Fernández is
my father’s paternal patronymic – wow, that’s repetitive. And de Llano, my
mom’s. Here it gets complicated. Many of my uncles and even my mom dropped the
“de” and just called themselves Llano. I never knew exactly why. A “de” signals
a noble title, and indeed, it was so at some point, though not in the proper
Middle Ages, where one earned it by being a ruthless warlord, but in the 18th
century, where, according to my mom, our forebear was a common highwayman.
Certainly there’s a story there I must learn.

However, I
suspect the pretentiousness of de Llano did not sit well with my Spanish
immigrant family, leftists all of them, nor in the Cuban working-class
environment in which they lived – we Cubans have all kinds of flaws, but we
detest pretentiousness. And, I also suspect, the “de” brought them revoltingly close
to Franco’s most notorious general, Queipo de Llano, supposedly the man who
gave the order of execution of that poet called García, Spain’s and arguably
the world’s most beloved. To be identified with a Fascist must have been
anathema; one of my uncles went back to Spain to fight – and die – in the
Spanish Civil War, precisely against Franco.

Still,
highwaymen and Fascists aside, I like de Llano, regardless of provenance, for
it is one of my family names. But when we migrated to the States, I dropped it.
Simple reason: American public schools required the endless filling of forms,
and there was no place for a second surname. Then I dropped Enrique and became
Henry.

My family
moved from Havana to Tampa in the late ‘50s. Tampa was the South, and
Southerners, in my experience, have trouble with foreign pronunciation. I’m
sure a linguist could give an explanation; my data is purely anecdotal. In
Tampa I did meet good old boys and girls who could speak some Spanish and do so
properly, having learned it in Florida’s most Hispanic city – until the Cuban
Revolution sent waves of us north to Miami. But, for the most part, there was a
pronunciation block.

A trilled
“r” after an “n” is hard to pull off, even if one is a native Spanish-speaker.
If you are one, try it now, try saying my name slowly and pay attention to the
convulsions of your tongue. Not easy. For your average Florida cracker
tongue-tied in foreign tongues, it’s pretty much impossible. So here I was, a 13-year
old kid seeing folk grimace with pain every time they tried to speak my name.
So I’d say, just call me Henry.

Grandfather Estanislao de Llano is one of the men doing military service in this faded photograph.

When it came
time to get naturalized – what an odd verb, does that mean I was until that
moment unnatural? – I used my name in English, as I had been doing for years.
And so, Henry became my legal name. Little did I know of the henpecked connotation of the name, since the only Henry I knew about was the one whose second name was VIII, and he was known to enforce his macho ways with the edge of an axe.

A number of my Cuban friends still called me Enrique, though many
called me Henry because the English equivalent is a common nickname among Latin
Americans, like, say, Colombians, who also add “old man” to the nickname, thus,
I can be viejo Henry. So once, when I
left the college where I was teaching to take on a year-long job elsewhere, the
Cuban friend I was replacing introduced me as Enrique, which is what he had
always called me. After a year, I got used to it again and it stuck.

Trouble was
my papers still read Henry. Eventually, after using the name in Spanish most of
the time, even my driver’s license and voter’s registration read Enrique. Until
9/11. When I had to renew my license, it reverted back to my legal name, Henry.
With that, I could only get a plane ticket under Henry. Finally, other
bureaucratic demands pushed me into being Henry, at least officially. And then
I moved to the Florida Panhandle, where the locals could no more pronounce Enrique
than their Tampa counterparts back in the day. So now I was Henry. Again.

Except to my
mom and some other family members, to whom I was Enriquito, as my own father
had been as a young man. Now and then some Latin American would call me Quique,
the usual nickname for Enrique. Professionally, though, I was and am still
Enrique. After all, it’s my birth name.

Well, not
quite. My name is Enrique Fernández de Llano. I think of using it again; after all,
it’s mine. Some of my Florida cracker buddies long ago would call me Hank to
rile me. Hank Fernandez sounds like a baseball player, though I would rather
think of myself as a country singer. And if I were a writer in Colombia, I know
I’d call myself Viejo Henry. Here in the States, all those surnames seem
pretentious, and a Spanish name, no matter how common, is less so in an
English-speaking country. Yeah, for how long? I already know of other Enrique
Fernández whose world overlaps mine – a salsa musician, a Dominican radio DJ,
and so on.

It’s a
quandary. Enough to drive one into forgetting the writer’s life and becoming a
highwayman. Asaltador de Caminos.
Maybe that’d be my name. Stand and deliver!